


Flesh Wound

by ChocolatePecan



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Blood, Canon Divergence, Death, Denial, Gen, Grief, Kink Meme, Loss, Mutilation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-22 20:33:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13174683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChocolatePecan/pseuds/ChocolatePecan
Summary: **SPOILERS THROUGHOUT**As Noctis fights his way through Zegnautus Keep, taunted by Ardyn all the way, he never lets himself doubt that he will find Prompto alive. He'll fight the monstrous MTs and the dark corners and burn down the impregnable keep. Ardyn has taken someone he can't afford to lose.A FFXV kink meme fill: https://ffxv-kinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/4398.html?thread=7490862#cmt7490862





	Flesh Wound

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks go to the lovely anon who offered this prompt on the kink meme. Also to my dearest kay_cricketed, without whose constant guidance and love this fic would have been impossible to write, and would certainly not be here to read.
> 
> The spoilers start from line one, so if you haven't finished the game yet I recommend you don't read any further (unless you like spoilers, in which case you're in luck).

The voice is unmistakable. _Noct! Help me!_ Noct knows it from the endless goading that makes Ignis push Prompto’s face away from him in the car, and from the requests to stop for photographs Noct can never say no to. He can’t mistake that voice, won’t mistake it like he mistook the owner’s body on the roof of the train. Prompto _is_ here. He _is_.

Noctis barely knows his own shadow as he races upwards through Zegnautus Keep. He turns a corner and another MT leaps out at him. It clings to his leg, screaming that awful scream, but by the Six he won’t let it stop him. He cuts it down. He’s getting the hang of the Ring of the Lucii now. Every time he uses it his heart races and his head spins but it’s worth it, because it takes him ever closer to Prompto. He’s travelled Eos to get here and has fought hard to do so. The crystal is his duty, but Prompto is his need.

Noct’s evenings have been spent awake with his hands locked together, either slung between his knees or used as a pillow behind his head. When he stops fighting, the black desolation inside him escapes its confines. He still aches from honouring Luna in Tenebrae. Seeing the places she lived and the grief of her people compounded his trinity of losses: his father, his kingdom, his betrothed.

But there’s one loss he can still prevent, so when the next MT grabs for him he skips away and drains it until it crumples.

Beneath the helplessness of Tenebrae all he’d wanted was to get back to the place where he’d knocked – _pushed –_ Prompto off the train and into the wilds. Night after night the horror on his friend’s face repeats itself as he falls: it's a staple in every dream, and every dream has an unhappy ending. Quit moping, keep hoping, Aranea had said, and Noctis has tied his hands to that thought. It’s a single burning coal in the miasma of self-blame and wretchedness.

Ignis and Gladio rejoin him, rescuing him from the contracting walls of an unavoidable trap. They move quickly to the heart of the keep, and success becomes palpable. Being reunited with them is like a permanent status boost. Their presence on his right and left is as natural as one foot in front of the other. There will be no more tricks now that they’re together. No more Promptos that aren’t Promptos. The next one is for real.

 _Oh dear. Prompto doesn’t look very well. I do hope you’ve been shopping._ Ardyn’s sickly voice makes Noctis want to burn everything down, but he can’t. Not yet, not until Prompto is in safe hands.

They pass through door after door but then, behind a barred gate, there is a flash of blonde. Noctis stops seeing the corridor around him or the bars in his way: just that flash of blonde Prompto fixes every morning in the rear view mirror. He’s here. That’s Prompto for sure.

The blood dripping from Prompto’s face bypasses Noct’s vision and arrives hard in his consciousness. There is a thick pool of it beneath the cross-shaped contraption his friend is held in.

Noct can’t get the gate open fast enough.

Drip.

His hands fumble with the key card.

Drip.

A lifetime passes before the gate pulls back, and when it does he squeezes inside before it can clang home. The tepid darkness makes it hard to see clearly, so Noct clasps Prompto’s cheeks with both hands and lifts his face to what light there is. Blood flows out of his nose, and it’s thin and watery.

Old blood is turning black around his mouth. His chin is covered in congealed knots of it, and Noct wipes it off with a palm. Prompto’s eyes are usually so honest, so brightly blue. Now they’re almost swollen shut with blood. Noctis searches the back of his friend’s head for a soft spot, a bit of skull that gives under pressure. There it is, at the top of the neck near the spine. He keeps calling Prompto’s name. ‘You need to come around now. It’s okay, we’ve got you. We’ve got you.’

‘Noct. What’s happening?’ There’s something wrong with Ignis’ voice, so Noct ignores it. He won’t be tricked by Ardyn again. His hands are slippery with blood as they squeeze it out of Prompto’s nose like mucus – he has to breathe – and then come to rest on the dagger sticking out of his chest, right about where that big heart is. Noct has to choose what to take out. The silver dagger, or the one with the wooden handle? The sword? The rudimentary lance with the shaft broken in half? They’re all jammed deep inside him. The sword is protruding from the back of Prompto’s ribcage and the point of the lance is about where his left kidney should be. There’s still a little warmth at the base of his spine.

Those bastards are going to hurt when they come out.

‘Give me a phoenix down,’ Noct says, turning to Ignis with his hand outstretched. Then he remembers Ignis will have trouble finding one. He turns the open hand to Gladio but Gladio has his back to him, his hands gripping his hair. He’s making noises like a bear, noises that make adrenaline fill Noct’s chest and enter his jaw. He shoves into Gladio’s back, leaving bloody handprints on his jacket, and as he turns Noct delves in his trouser pocket for phoenix down.

It doesn’t do anything. Prompto’s face remains bloody, and now his jaw is slack. Noctis checks his own pockets, but can’t remember if he has any phoenix down, can’t remember anything anymore, except the first time Prompto beat him at some stupid shooting game in the arcade and he jumped around so much that he fell into a cardboard gunman cut-out and knocked it flying.

Noctis finds another plume of phoenix down and crushes it. Some phoenixes must be better survivors than others. This one must be dead. ‘Come on,’ he says, clasping Prompto’s head in both hands and pressing their foreheads together. ‘Come on, don’t do this to me. Don’t do this to me.’ He turns to Gladio. ‘Another!’

‘Stop it,’ Gladio says. His expression is set like a funeral mask now, but his eyes are haunted.

Noct turns to Ignis, grabbing him and searching his inside jacket pockets. Ignis’ voice still sounds wrong, like he knows something he’s not telling.

‘I can’t hear Prompto. Somebody please tell me what’s bloody well happened.’

‘Nothing! Nothing’s happened!’ Noct turns back to Prompto with another phoenix down. He crushes it again, but the most powerful magic known outside the crystal still does nothing. He presses their foreheads together once more, bumping them hard. Then again. Harder. He closes his eyes. This time the growl is his.

 _Oh. How touching. The young prince’s love for his dead friend. Perhaps I should have been more careful with him._ Ardyn’s laugh turns Noct’s stomach.

‘It’s a trick, isn’t it?’ Noct yells at the air, two hands on the staff of the lance embedded in his best friend’s body. ‘I fell for it again. How many times? How many times do I have to do this?!’

_He held out for you, you know. Believed in his dearest friend until the very end. Even after you’d pushed him off a train. What a pity you couldn’t be there for him when he needed you most._

Noctis knows that Prompto thinks he’s not brave, but really, he’s their lionheart. He’s the one who challenges his fears the most because he has so many. He’s the one who rushes up to a boundary, stumbles at its presence, and then climbs over it. He’s the one who lifts their spirits by singing bawdy songs into the night, who makes fun of himself so much that it feels churlish to do it more. He’s the one who would scream under torture, while Ardyn put a hole in his skull and jammed things up his nose. He’s the one who would grasp at the weapons in his chest with the last of his strength, trying to pull them out. He’s the one who wouldn’t pray to a god, but to Noctis himself.

A noise comes out of Noctis, one he didn’t know humans could make. As he pulls the lance from Prompto’s body there’s more blood, and worse, but he’s hardly even in the room anymore. Then he pulls out the daggers, and the sword, and then there are hands on his shoulders, big hands, an arm around his neck, that familiar Ignis cologne. Stop, they tell him, stop. Noct tells himself that every time he replays his last memory of seeing Prompto alive. His hands had only a second to tell him the truths his eyes had kept secret; the familiar cut of the waistcoat and its pockets, the shape of the chest beneath them, and the rattle of the rivets on Prompto’s Crownsguard uniform as he shoved him off the train.


End file.
